Once, though, he left them alone all day.
“Take care on your way home, Bjorn,” Thurid warned. “I think my husband means to put a stop to your visits. He’s probably lying in wait for you on the path, and I don’t think he intends to fight fair.”
Bjorn was indeed ambushed on his way through the mountains. Outnumbered five to one, he managed to kill two of his attackers, and the others fled. He limped home, badly wounded, and his father patched him up. At the next assembly, Bjorn was banished from Iceland for three years for killing the two men. He joined the most famous band of Vikings, the Jomsvikings, and made a name for himself plundering the rim of the Baltic Sea.
Meanwhile, Thurid gave birth to a son.
When Bjorn returned from his Viking voyage, he saw mother and son at a fair and remarked to a friend of his, “The boy looks exactly like me. Too bad he doesn’t know who his father is.”
“Stay away from her,” said his friend. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I know it is. But my heart says otherwise.”
Thurid apparently agreed, for she and Bjorn picked up where they’d left off. And although her husband didn’t like it a bit, the saga says, he couldn’t do much about it, since Bjorn had such a reputation now as a fighter.
Another woman who found herself married to the wrong man is Oddny Eykindill (her nickname means “Island-Candle,” as in “Light of the Land”). Oddny’s childhood sweetheart is also named Bjorn. He and Oddny were betrothed, but like most Icelandic boys in the Viking Age, Bjorn wanted to go off to Norway first to make a name for himself. She agreed to wait three years for him—four if he sent word.
At eighteen, Bjorn took Norway by storm. Another Icelander at the king’s court, a thirty-three-year-old poet named Thord, became jealous. He buddied up to Bjorn, got him drunk, and heard all about Oddny Island-Candle. That summer Thord sailed home and rode to see Oddny. He delivered a message and a gold ring from Bjorn, then added—falsely—that Bjorn thought she should marry Thord if Bjorn didn’t come home. The next year, word came that Bjorn was wounded in a duel; Thord put it about that Bjorn was dead. Oddny insisted on waiting the full four years, but Bjorn didn’t come home. By the time he had recovered enough to travel, the last ship of the year had sailed. When he heard, later, that Oddny had married Thord, he decided not to go home at all.
Oddny and Thord had eight children and seemed to be happily married until one day Bjorn did come home. “Have you heard any news today, Thord?” Oddny said.
“No, but I’m supposing you have.”
“Yes, I’ve heard something I’d call news. I’ve heard that a ship has come in, and the owner is Bjorn, who you said was dead.”
“Well, you might call that news.”
“It certainly is news!” said Oddny. “And now I know the kind of man I married. I thought you were a good man, but you are full of lies and deceit.”
Thord invited Bjorn to spend the winter with them. “That will fix things up between us,” he told Oddny.
“You’re lying again if you think that.”
The visit did not go well. Oddny and Bjorn spent as much time together as they could, talking and laughing, and, in Thord’s opinion, “adding one insult to another.” He flew into a rage and slapped Oddny, kissed and fondled her in front of Bjorn, refused to let her into his bed, snooped around trying to catch the lovers in the act, and generally made everyone miserable. Soon the two men stopped speaking to each other, except to trade insulting verses, into which Bjorn always managed to slip a mention of his love for Oddny.
“Quit making verses about me, you two,” said Oddny. “None of this was my idea.”
Bjorn left when the winter was up, but the feud went on for years and years, escalating from nasty verses to the killing of servants and followers. Finally Thord ambushed Bjorn in his horse pasture. Dying, Bjorn spotted Oddny’s young son Kolli in the mob. “You shouldn’t be fighting me,” Bjorn said.
“Why should I show you mercy?” said Kolli.
“Ask your mother.”
Girls like Thurid and Oddny Island-Candle were often married off at fourteen, presumably to keep them from choosing someone grossly unsuitable (such as a Romeo on the wrong side of a family feud). Yet, even so young, some had definite ideas of what they wanted in a man and took steps toward getting it. A girl named Thorgunna, for instance, thought she’d made a good catch when the young Leif Eiriksson, on his first voyage to Norway, was driven off course and forced to shelter from a storm in the Hebrides off Scotland. They fell in love, and she became pregnant. When the winds changed and Leif got ready to sail, Thorgunna said she wanted to go home with him to Greenland. But Leif had neither the pluck to elope (“there are so few of us,” he said of his crew, anticipating a sea chase) or the maturity to make a formal offer to her noble father. He gave her presents instead: a gold ring, a wool cloak, and a belt of walrus ivory. Like many of the Gaelic women in the sagas, Thorgunna is a little uncanny. Fixing him with a cold stare, she warned, “You’ll wonder later on if you’ve made the right choice.”
“I’ll take my chances,” he said brightly, but Thorgunna had more to say: “Your child will be a boy. I’ll send him to you in Greenland as soon as he can travel. And I expect you’ll be as happy to see him come as I am to see you go.”
Unfortunately, the saga never tells us if the boy came or not.
About the time these stories were being written down in Iceland, the most popular tales in France and Britain were those of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Chretien de Troyes wrote the romance Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart in the late 1100s. In it, the beautiful Queen Guenevere is kidnapped and Sir Lancelot must ride to her rescue. Once at the castle, he convinces the kidnapper to behave honorably by returning the queen unsullied to King Arthur, and they all have supper and go to bed. Then, Sir Lancelot sneaks into the queen’s room and they have sex (not for the first time). They are found out, and the rest of the tale involves the tangle of lies and trials and duels needed to clear the queen’s name. It remains for a later writer to suggest that Guenevere be burned at the stake for adultery.
Robert de Boron, writing in the early 1200s, however, has just such a scene in his three-part romance about the quest for the Holy Grail. A young and pious maiden abandons herself to despair after her father loses his fortune, and a demon corrupts her. When her subsequent pregnancy reveals itself, she is jailed for refusing to identify her lover, and is to be burned at the stake when her child reaches eighteen months (and presumably no longer needs a mother). Fortunately, that child is the precocious Merlin, who goes to court as his mother’s lawyer and proves that the judge himself is illegitimate and therefore unfit to sit the bench. Case dismissed.
Characters akin to the two lusty Icelandic witches, Geirrid and Katla, might appear in the Arthurian romances, but the honorable saga women—like Thurid, Thorgunna of the Hebrides, and Oddny Island-Candle—are in a different class altogether from Queen Guenevere and Merlin’s mother. For one thing, they couldn’t care a whit if everyone knew who they were sleeping with, before or after marriage. For another, in all cases, it’s the man and not the woman or her child who is punished for “fooling around.” If she had lived in the Iceland of the sagas, Queen Guenevere could have enjoyed her love affair with Lancelot as openly as Thurid did hers with Bjorn, leaving it to her husband to challenge the hero to a fight if he didn’t like it. Or she could have sued for divorce. One saga wife left her husband because he was impotent and didn’t “satisfy” her. Another didn’t give her reasons. She just walked out, dumping her husband’s clothes in the urine barrel so he couldn’t chase after her. Both women got back their dowries, which was a substantial sum, often the value of a farm.
Virginity and illegitimacy were also nonissues (as they'remain in present-day Iceland). Olaf the Peacock, one of the richest and most powerful men in the sagas, was illegitimate, but no one would dare tell him he was unfit to be a judge because of it. In general, bastards were treated the same as
the rest of a mans brood. When Njal’s illegitimate son was killed one night, his mother rode to Njal’s house and woke him up, shouting, “Get out of my rival’s bed and bring that woman and her sons, too.” She led them to where the boy lay dead. While the men were muttering about who might have done the deed, Njal’s wife remarked, “You men are ridiculous. You run off and kill someone over next to nothing, yet when something happens that cries out for vengeance, you stand around talking it over.” Duly chastened, her sons ride off to avenge the death of their half-brother.
In a romance like the King Arthur tales, a young woman is “occupied” throughout most of the plot with protecting her virginity, “her principal claim to an identity,” saga scholar Robert Kellogg noted at a conference in Reykjavik in 1999. A young saga woman, by contrast, “is far more straightforward and grown up than this, with a sure sense of who she is that is quite independent of any subtleties of anatomy.” Thorgunna of the Hebrides was in no danger of being burned at the stake, only of being burned in love.
Why do saga women have more sexual freedom than their counterparts in Arthurian romance? Scholars muse that women were more highly prized in Viking Iceland because they were rare. If Iceland was settled by Viking bands disgruntled with the king of Norway, there might not have been enough young women to go around. Yet a wife was essential to running a farm. There were certain things no self-respecting Viking man would do, such as weaving or sewing. No man would milk a ewe or make cheese. No Viking would cook, unless aboard ship, and even then it was considered demeaning. Without a woman (wife, mother, sister, or daughter), a man could not be king of his own hill. The wife taught the children their duties and obligations, which required an exact knowledge of family ties and degrees of kinship—this is what the dying Bjorn suggested young Kolli ask his mother about. (Kolli immediately put down his sword and walked away. There is no shame worse than being a father-killer.) The wife, in many sagas, determined when blood-money would be accepted for a man’s death, and when the killing demanded revenge instead. She hired and fired servants and was in charge of the food—preserving it, preparing it, and sharing it out. In those years when winter lingered and supplies dwindled, the wife decided who starved. The wife made the farm’s only marketable product—cloth—and she may also have done the selling, which, in a land with no towns, meant bargaining one-on-one with the captain or crew of a trading ship from Norway. In the grave of a wealthy wife in Kornsa, Iceland, dated to Viking times, was found a set of copper scales to weigh money, alongside the more usual womanly goods: kettle, shears, and cooking spit of iron; a comb; some brooches and beads; tweezers, a knife, and a bronze bell; her dog and her horse.
In Iceland, as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, love was not a prerequisite for marriage. Marriage was a social arrangement, a merger of two families, a matter of economics. Most marriages were arranged, and the girl had little or no say in it. Yet most marriages turned out like Oddny Island-Candle’s: She was content; she had eight children and a fine, rich farm. “People thought things had turned out even better for her than if she’d married Bjorn,” the saga says. Then Bjorn came home, and she learned that she had been deceived. The moral of the story, for this and many other sagas, is that a marriage founded on trickery or coercion can lead to chaos, and whole families—a whole society—can come crashing down because of one unhappy wife.
This pattern is most clearly seen in Njal’s Saga, the one saga almost everyone in Iceland knows, it having been required reading in grammar school for generations. It was popular in the Middle Ages, too: There are more manuscript copies of Njal’s Saga in existence than of any of the other sagas. From a historian’s point of view, it is the best. Unfortunately, Njal’s Saga is also the most misogynistic of the major sagas. Whereas the sexy aggressiveness of other saga women is simply magnificent, that of Hallgerd Long-Legs, the central female figure in Njal’s Saga, has an evil sheen to it. She is petty. She is also hungry, literally and metaphorically. She is a woman of power who doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.
As a girl she was outraged at being married without her consent. As a young wife, she was wasteful and extravagant. Once she went so far as to call her husband stingy. He slapped her face—and was killed for it by her foster-father, whom Hallgerd then sent to hide out with a wizard known for brewing up wild storms. Her beloved second husband was also killed for slapping her, but this time she avenged him, sending her fosterfather to his own death.
Following those two marriages, Hallgerd lived as a widow for fourteen years, running her own farm and raising her daughter. Then she met Gunnar of Hlidarendi. Gunnar was the best catch in Iceland—handsome, tall, accomplished, rich. He asked for her hand. Her uncle tried to talk him out of it. “It’s not an even match,” he said. “You’re a fine, capable man, but she’s rather a mixed bag, to be honest.”
When Gunnar defended Hallgerd, her uncle said, “I can see you’re madly in love. You’ll just have to face what comes.”
Most people think Njal’s Saga is about the close friendship between Gunnar, the man of action, and Njal, the wise negotiator. Or about the conversion of Iceland to Christianity and the changes it brought. Or about the conflict between law and justice in a land with no king. All of these themes are important. But there would be no saga, no tragedy, without Hallgerd’s unhappiness. Gunnar treats her as a pretty toy: His mother wields the power, running the household while Hallgerd gossips and flirts with the farmhands (who prove their devotion by killing people for her). Every decision Hallgerd makes, her husband undercuts.
At an autumn feast, Hallgerd and Njal’s wife, Bergthora, had a spat over who should sit in the seat of honor. Bergthora placed her young daughter-in-law there, instead of Hallgerd. “What do you take me for, a hornkerling?” said Hallgerd, meaning an old hag shoved off into a corner. Stung, she insulted Bergthora by making fun of Njal’s lack of a beard.
Said Bergthora, referring to Hallgerd’s first marriage, “Your own husband had a beard, I’m told, when you had him killed.”
Hallgerd roared for revenge, and Gunnar jumped up from the table. “You’re not making a fool out of me,” he told his wife. “I’m going home.”
Hallgerd soon had one of Bergthora’s slaves killed. Bergthora retaliated. When Gunnar told Hallgerd to stop antagonizing his friends, she answered, “Trolls take your friends.” Njal and Gunnar settled the six killings with blood-money, but their friendship was strained. One tight year, Gunnar tried to buy food from another neighbor—not Njal—and was rebuffed. Hallgerd sent a man to steal some cheese and burn down the neighbor’s storehouse. When the theft came to light, Gunnar slapped Hallgerd in the face.
“I’ll remember that,” she said.
The cheese feud led to Gunnar being outlawed from Iceland for three years. When his horse stumbled on the way to the ship, Gunnar leaped off and, looking back at his farm, spoke the most influential lines in all the Icelandic sagas—lines that awakened the independence movement in the nineteenth century and resulted in the country’s break with Denmark: “Fair are the hillsides, so fair as I have never seen them before, the pale meadows and just-mown hayfields. I am going home and I will never leave again.”
Gunnar’s enemies surrounded his house. He held them off until his bowstring broke. “Give me two locks of your hair, Hallgerd, and make me a bowstring.”
“Have you forgotten that time you slapped me?”
“Everyone has his own claim to fame. I won’t ask again.”
The saga is only half over when Gunnar dies. Hallgerd is seen once more, trading insults with Njal’s sons. The Njalssons are eventually trapped by their enemies in their burning house. Given permission to flee the flames, Njal chose to die with his sons, and Bergthora to stand by her man.
If The Saga of Eirik the Red took up three hundred pages in a modern paperback translation, as does Njal’s Saga, instead of only thirty, we might have an image of Gudrid the Far-Traveler to match that of Hallgerd Long-Legs. Instead we can only see Gudrid mirrored
in other saga women. For instance, like Hallgerd, Gudrid is described as a skörungur, a word translators have serious trouble with—although the saga-writer clearly thinks it’s a compliment. In modern Icelandic, the word means a fireplace poker. Concentrating on what a fireplace poker does, William Morris in the 1890s came up with “a very stirring woman.” And Hallgerd does stir things up, mostly trouble. Yet a man labeled a skörungur Morris called “a shaper” or “a leader.” Other early translators turned a female “poker” into “brave-hearted,” “high-spirited,” “noble,” “of high mettle,” “fine,” “superior,” “of great magnificence,” and “a paragon of a woman.” They might have done better to think what a poker looks like. For skörungur does, in the end, have to do with manhood. The root skör means an edge, like the edge of a sword.
Examine, for instance, a more likable skörungur: Gudrun the Fair, heroine of Laxdaela Saga. Many of the male characters from Njal’s Saga—such as Hallgerd’s father and uncle—appear in Laxdaela Saga, recognizably themselves. Yet the female characters in this second saga are so strong and admirable that some readers suspect the story was written by a woman in response to Njal’s Saga. We read of Unn the Deep-Minded, who emigrated from Scotland with all her kin, claimed a chunk of land “as big as a man’s,” parceled it out to her followers, and lived out her life as a chieftain in all but name, marrying off her grandchildren to make alliances. There is Melkorka, sold as a slave to Hallgerd Long-Legs’s father, Hoskuld: Melkorka pretended to be a deaf-mute, revealing nothing. Not until she was caught speaking Irish to her son, Olaf the Peacock, did she admit she was the daughter of an Irish king. After her status as a princess came out, Hoskuld bought her a farm and set her up as an independent woman. Olaf married well and had five sons and three daughters. He offered to raise his half-brother’s son, Bolli, to mend fences in the family, and with that we come to the crux of the saga.
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